Chapter 92 contemplation of pain

When a sad past event flows through your mind, what you see is not my sadness, but a kind of sadness. There was a divorced woman who was depressed all day long. All she could think about was the misfortunes in her married life. She lost interest in life and even attempted suicide.Later, she became a patient of the psychotherapist Dixie Lage. It was of course difficult for Disilage to ask her to sit still and watch the second hand of the clock on the wall without distraction.So Disilage asked her to record the moment when her attention was interrupted and the thoughts that came to her mind when she found her mind wandering.

At that time, the thoughts that flowed through the divorced woman's mind were mainly regrets about the various misfortunes between herself and her husband.But she soon discovered that in addition to these annoyances, there were also some thoughts that she hadn't paid much attention to before. In the process of staring at the second hand, they popped up suddenly, but were quickly overshadowed by her own sadness. Through this approach, Discirag said, the main idea is to let the patient know that she has more than just bad memories in her mind.Staring at the second hand, like paying attention to one's breathing in Buddhist practice, aims to make the patient a watcher of her disturbed emotions rather than a melancholy thinker.

The concept of Buddhism is to let all kinds of mind-created thoughts flow through the heart one by one, neither rejecting them nor welcoming them, but observing them attentively, as if they are real.If it is a sad past that flows through your heart, what you see is not my sadness, but a kind of sadness.By analogy, one can deeply observe the nature of all things, thereby bringing about spiritual liberation and realizing Nirvana. This kind of observation is called the awareness of separation by western psychologists. Dixirag believes that the primary goal of observation is to show the patient the process of his own mind operation, and he will slowly discover that in the depths of his mind, Even outside, there is a quiet and strong ego, which can observe, name, and see other selves who regret past pain or dwell in future happiness.Only by identifying with this neutral, observing self can we escape from the cage and escape from the sea of ​​suffering.